Lead Principal Site Reliability Engineer(Python, Kubernetes & Cloud Infra)

Career Level IC5

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Site Reliability Developer to join the Engineering team within the SaaS Apps and Delivery organization. This IC5 role will provide technical leadership in designing developing operating and continuously improving reliable scalable and secure cloud-native services running on Kubernetes in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The successful candidate will own complex reliability and automation initiatives influence technical direction across teams and help establish engineering standards for deployment observability resilience and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• MCA BE MS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 10 years of experience designing developing and operating large-scale customer-facing web services or cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing architecture or engineering practices across teams.
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes container technologies and managing production applications in Kubernetes environments.
• Strong understanding of Cloud PaaS SaaS and IaaS environments; Linux Windows or Solaris administration; infrastructure security; compliance; monitoring; and instrumentation.
• Proven experience with multi-region architectures high availability disaster recovery and capacity or performance engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience automating infrastructure and deployments using Terraform.
• Extensive experience designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines with GitLab Git Jenkins and modern branching strategies.
• Proficiency in Python preferred with experience in one or more of Bash Golang PowerShell JavaScript or Java.
• Strong understanding of automation orchestration Agile development DevOps and SRE practices.
• Ability to create and review technical architecture documentation and operational runbooks.
• Strong analytical problem-solving written and verbal communication skills.
• A collaborative mindset with the ability to mentor others and drive adoption of new cloud technologies and engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities
Application Software Development:

• Architects and delivers multi-team features and modernization initiatives with clear organization-level KPIs.

• Establishes global production-readiness standards (SLOs error budgets incident tooling) and drives adoption.

• Diagnoses and resolves high-severity multi-system failures; creates systemic reliability improvements across apps/OCI.

• Harmonizes QA strategy across teams (test pyramids non-functional testing) to ensure consistent app quality.

• Makes significant architectural decisions; leads migrations and pattern adoptions with deprecation plans.

• Creates scalable blueprints and reference implementations adopted by multiple teams.

• Defines cross-team API governance and dependency management frameworks.

• Shapes prioritization across multiple teams using data from field/customer telemetry and live-site signals.

• Institutionalizes feedback loops into planning cadences; measures impact.

• Mentors Staff engineers; partners with Product and Design to balance customer value and technical strategy.

Software Development and Coding - Design Testing and Optimization:

• Leads project initiatives to design software solutions and identify and analyze requirements. Writes and defines foundational code for new projects or prototypes.

• Adheres to and improves execution of all phases of the software development lifecycle; coaches engineers across teams or units to drive improvements.

• Acts as a subject matter expert within the organization to develop and guide new software features and enhancements following design specifications ensuring accessibility and develops documents to clarify software design and code.

• Leads process architecture and code reviews across projects and/or products/services to drive improvements.

• Utilizes modern/emerging technologies to conduct debugging and troubleshooting to identify and fix highly complex software issues.

• Leads strategic initiatives to optimize software testing (e.g. functional and non-functional) quality assurance processes software error logging monitoring and observability for effective debugging.

• Encourages innovation research and relevant industry practices to optimize performance across products and domains.

• Resolves and may troubleshoot highly complex and systematic issues requiring innovation related to application programming interface (API) functionality and integration.

• Implements innovative API versioning lifecycle and interoperability strategies.

Software Architecture - Software System Structural Design:

• Leads task and project initiatives for the design and development of software systems and services. Defines project or design scope; reviews influences and approves scope and design recommendations.

• Provides technical guidance domain expertise and coaching in software architecture decisions and best practices that drive key organizational decisions including industry standards and competitive considerations providing mentorship and coaching for small teams and peers and contributing to both individual and team development across line of business/function.

• Utilizes innovative methods to conduct highly complex periodic reviews and ensures adherence to architectural standards.

• Collaborates with stakeholders across lines of business and externally to align and build software architecture with business and/or customer goals and priorities.

• Implements innovative performance optimization and scalability strategies in software design.

• Conducts regular technology research and evaluation for architectural enhancements and translates into decisions and plans that can have a major impact on the organization.

Issue/Defect Collaboration - Software Products Support:

• Collaborates with stakeholders internally and externally to lead efforts to understand customer issues root causes and mitigation to align and explain rationale behind solutions.

• Must provide expert technical guidance and support to customers regarding customer-reported issues to mitigate recurrence.

• Acts as an advisor to advocate for customers interests and suggests product enhancements and solutions based on feedback.

• Networks across lines of business to ensure customer satisfaction through timely resolution of issues and effective communication.

• Guides implementation of strategic solutions for customer issue and/or defect handling and training processes.

• Investigates and troubleshoots the most complex and broadly reaching product maintenance issues to ensure customer agreement on short- and long-term solutions (e.g. future enhancements).

Practices and Standards Compliance - Security and Compliance:

• Collaborates with the security team and leadership teams to establish follow and improve upon development practices and coding standards providing coaching to less experienced team members.

• Participates in peer review processes and provides technical leadership with initiatives to ensure quality and adherence to broad acceptance criteria during development.

• Demonstrates contributes to and shares deep expertise of industry best practices and their application to software development processes.

• Implements highly complex secure software development practices/solutions requiring modern/emerging innovation to prevent security vulnerabilities leveraging automated solutions to augment the manual review process.

Development Operations - System Maintenance:

• Leads project initiatives for periodic maintenance and testing operations for systems that require upgrading or patching (e.g. for critical vulnerabilities).

• Acts as subject matter expert to drive improvements ensures automation testing and debugging of systems to ensure service/product availability health support and reliability.

Core Responsibilities
Planning & Execution:

• Manages and provides direction on timelines deliverables and budgets when applicable for critical high-impact projects or initiatives that impact the line of business ensuring timely completion and adherence to requirements.

• Anticipates and plans for shifts in resources or timelines based on changing business priorities ensuring optimal outcomes.

Collaboration & Partnership:

• Influences cross-functional leaders and external stakeholders to gain alignment on strategic objectives.

• Fosters partnerships with key business leaders stakeholders and/or customers identifying opportunities for expanding partnerships and promoting long-term organizational success.

• Champions transparency and inclusivity by actively seeking listening to and incorporating diverse perspectives.

Problem Solving:

• Leads specialized advanced problem-solving efforts serving as an escalation point for complex issues.

• Guides others to leverage innovative data-driven techniques to address ambiguous or novel issues identify root causes and drives the implementation of solutions that prevent future issues.

Continuous Learning:

• Leverages deep industry knowledge and expertise to serve as a thought leader within the organization.

• Contributes to the advancement of the field or industry through thought leadership (e.g. conference presentations white papers research contributions).

• Maintains and evolves expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends technologies and industry standards ensuring the organization remains current with best practices.

• Champions continuous learning and knowledge sharing promoting professional development across teams. Applies new knowledge to drive advancement and mentors others to do the same.

Continuous Improvement:

• Develops innovative solutions and drives the implementation of ideas that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes protocols and workflows across the organization.

• Evaluates effectiveness of updated approaches and methods for continued improvement to enhance efficiencies and ensure changes align with organizational goals.

• Designs and develops metrics to measure success of improvement initiatives.

Performance and Development:

• Serves as a subject matter expert regarding talent needs and organizational talent strategy.

• Imparts leadership and expert knowledge throughout the talent development pipeline including candidate interviews candidate assessment and hiring decisions ensuring alignment with organizational talent strategy.

Career Level - IC5